‘Gertie’s Babies,’ Sold at Birth, Use DNA to Unlock Secret Past

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — Sue Docken’s start in life, in 1951, with a no-questions-asked cash adoption at the hands of a midwife, had strong elements of the crime scene that it was.

Her adoptive father was told to stay in the car and keep the motor running. His wife went into a nondescript office building in Butte, Mont., where she met with the midwife, Gertrude Pitkanen, and was handed the hours-old infant and the afterbirth, offered a peek through a curtain at the young mother lying in a bed, and told to leave. The afterbirth was thrown out the window on the drive home, Ms. Docken was later told by her adoptive parents, who paid $500 for her that day.

Ms. Docken is one of about two dozen people, mostly in the West, belonging to a self-styled club whose members call themselves “Gertie’s Babies.” (More are believed to be out there, unknown perhaps even to themselves.) Their lives are diverse, connected only by a common thread, Ms. Pitkanen. Sometimes known more grandly as Gertrude Pitkanen Van Orden, she delivered and sold babies, performed abortions — and mostly evaded legal consequence — in Butte from the 1920s through the 1950s. The secrets she left have fueled a search for origins and answers, in some cases lasting decades.

Now, some of the back stories of the Gertie’s Babies have started to come to light through DNA-matching research sites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com, to which people can send a cheek swab in hopes of finding a match with relatives who have also submitted a DNA sample. Tales have emerged of desperation, betrayal and secrets taken to the grave, but also of joy and newfound connection, like Heather Livergood’s.

Ms. Livergood, 69, a retired secretary, lives on a tidy street here in this northern Idaho community with her husband, Steve, also 69, in a home that smells of fresh coffee and muffins. She grew up loved, she said, no question about that — the parents who bought her from Ms. Pitkanen in February 1946 could not have been better. But she was also haunted until last year by the fragments of the story she had: her father’s memories, the day he bought her in a motel room for $100 and the mostly false birth certificate signed by Ms. Pitkanen that said her mother’s name was Violet Wilson.

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A newspaper article about Gertrude Pitkanen, an abortionist in Montana who was responsible for the sale of dozens of newborn babies on the black market.CreditRajah Bose for The New York Times

Through an Ancestry.com match last year, Ms. Livergood found a cousin, who began combing family records and memories and found a Violet who had lived in the small town of Grantsville, Utah, about a 45-minute drive from Salt Lake City.

The rest of the story slowly spilled out over months: how Ms. Wilson’s real last name was Sandberg, and how in mid-1945, with World War II winding down but her husband still away in the Army Air Corps in the Pacific, she became pregnant with another man’s child.

“Poor Violet,” Ms. Livergood said. She said learning the story had given her new insight into the lonely years of the war and the dark secrets her mother never whispered to her two sons, half brothers to Ms. Livergood, who met them for the first time in September.

Baby sellers like Ms. Pitkanen are part of American subculture, especially through the mid-20th century, from the Wasserman ring in New Jersey to the Cole Babies of Miami. But the aging cohort of Gertie’s adoptees say they believe they are unique in having never found any living biological parents, so securely were the secrets locked down.

Theories about why are thorny and thick. Some of the Gertie’s babies said old-timers in Butte had told them that Ms. Pitkanen worked with the local business and political elite, and kept a black book full of blackmail-worthy intelligence.

Brought up several times on criminal charges related to botched, fatal abortions, those old-timers said, Ms. Pitkanen waved her black book, and each time, a judge threw out the case.

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Scrapbook material from Ms. Livergood's life includes a photo of her with her half brothers.CreditRajah Bose for The New York Times

“The details of how these things happened, I don’t think will ever be found,” said Rob Derrick, a computer scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Mr. Derrick, 59, is not a Gertie’s Baby, but he found out recently to his huge shock — after sending his DNA to one of the websites, looking for cousins or other relatives — that he has a half brother and half sister who are.

The siblings were given up by their mother, Antoinette Josephine Derrick. Mr. Derrick and the man he calls “my new brother,” Gary Drake, along with their wives, plan to meet for the first time this weekend in Butte.

Mr. Drake, 61, the special projects director for a rescue mission in Billings, Mont., said the news had been a shock to him as well.

“The narrative I’ve had about my origins, all my life, is wrong,” he said. In a tale that Mr. Derrick knew well, but that Mr. Drake did not, their mother was betrayed by her husband, who came back from World War II having fathered a son in France and seeking a divorce. Mrs. Derrick never remarried and died of a heart attack at age 44.

“She led a really hard life — really hard,” Mr. Derrick said.

But with the Pitkanen ring, there are stories within stories. Ms. Livergood’s connections, for example, were partly traced through an ancestor with a distinctive name, Ulrich Winegar. Members of Mr. Winegar’s family, early Mormon converts, went west to Utah in the 1800s and became the foundation of a giant but easily traceable lineage that included Ms. Livergood and her mother.

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Ms. Livergood's mostly false birth certificate signed by Ms. Pitkanen that said her mother’s name was Violet Wilson.CreditRajah Bose for The New York Times

Sherry Keller, 62, a Gertie’s Baby in Texas, just got a DNA hit in the last few weeks, connecting her through a cousin to a family in Montana.

Mable Deane, 65, who was given up in a Pitkanen adoption in 1949, learned that the woman who had adopted her had also worked for Ms. Pitkanen as a kind of go-between, setting up other adoptions.

Ms. Pitkanen, who died in 1960, left a complicated legacy with the adoptees themselves.

Some found a depth of character. Ms. Deane became pregnant at age 19 in 1968 in a small town in Montana, a time and place, she said, “when single mothers just didn’t have babies.”

Knowing only that her mother had given her up, Ms. Deane decided to keep her own child, a course she said she might not have had the strength to follow without the crucible of her past. She has never found a clue to her own origins.

Ms. Docken is also among the unsuccessful searchers. About a month ago, she went back to Butte from her home near Bozeman, Mont., and drove by the office building where she was born, just to see it.

The building stands empty and sagging with age, she said, and still holding on to its secrets.

Elisa Cho contributed research.

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